P2K: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 20-1

Your taste, Lex, isn't a model for the universe. No one's is or should be. And it isn't helpful to go around preening about how wonderfully diverse your own tastes are. People like what they like. The more honest we are about it, the better. Even if that means we have to admit our biases.

Maybe the difference is between an ordered list [bad] and an unordered list [ok]?

What would you like them to do? Vote for/rep for stuff they don't actually like, but feel they should?

― Granny Dainger

^^^^ This. We need to broaden the pool, not try to shame people into lying about what they like.

Also got to take into account that it might not just be the writers who are the problem- i.e. hip-hop is rarely made by women, so naturally less women making rap music will make the lists. In fact, this imbalance is most probably true of most genres although not to the extent in which men dominate hip-hop.

Why are there less female lead guitarists? Or are there thousands of them we just don't know about because of the big bad pitchfork critics not liking ladies?

My friend, I don't "politicise" my tastes. I listen to what I like. Some of what I like is male, some of it is female. I have noticed a slight aesthetic tendency towards female vocalists because I simply prefer the sound of female voices.

But it's like, the moment you try to address this vast imbalance of how men can't seem to listen to women (and in some cases, as Kerr pointed out about metallers that fight against "girly" music) - you're accused of "politicising" things.

I mean, maybe this requires a vast change in the way that female musicians are marketed, a change in the way that men view women, fullstop (as one of my bandmates commented on straight male audience members - "it's like they're so busy figuring out whether they want to shag us they haven't got around to noticing what we sound like").

The mostly male voice of the media is FAR FROM the only problem, and it's massively oversimplifying the matter to say that it is.

Maybe the difference is between an ordered list [bad] and an unordered list [ok]?

Well no, it's a different type of list but it's still ordered; you just don't get to see what came in 2 through 20 for the various questions. Even an "unordered" list still has some order to it, otherwise you'd just write down everything you did for the time period being covered. Whenever you pick your favorite anything, you're making a ranking.

Why are there less female lead guitarists?

Generally speaking, women are smaller than men.

yeah, by "ordered" I meant "linearly ordered" as in "these are 20 picks, ordered from best to worst" whereas an unordered list doesn't indicate what's better than what. But your point, I see, is that by selecting anything as worthy of mention, it's being declared better than what wasn't selected. That makes sense.

women are rarely unable to appreciate male artists

neither are men in my personal experience (men i've met and spoken to about music over the last 20 years). but this is a really unhelpful generalisation either way.

the generalisation that people are MORE LIKELY to like music made by people they can relate to may be unhelpful too but it seems more of a 'truth', again, in my personal experience.

re: a hoy hoy

That's the other side of the coin, and a fair rebuttal. Some genres such a boy's club that worrying about critical gender bias is beside the point (metal, f'rinstance). But that isn't true of music in general, or of pop. It isn't even true of indie. In this case, the canon seems narrower than the genre. At least a little narrower.

Dan, it's the difference between "your favourite" (i.e. subjective) and "the best" - which is the way that these "best of" top 10 lists are posed with this illusion of "objectivity" which clearly does not exist the moment you look at them on a slightly more than casual level.

And please, let's not get into the "oh, but there are just *less* female X..." because that, like everything, is a point of who is doing the counting. I was on a messageboard where someone tried to say that there were so few female superstar DJs because "women don't DJ." The irony being, that, seeing how I was a member of a mostly-female DJ collective, I personally knew at least a dozen female DJs, while, before signing up for that forum, I had known maybe 3 male DJs?

i don't think race or gender is much of a factor in my being able to "relate" to an artist.

i don't think men are unable to appreciate female artists at all, which again brings up the question of why there's this huge gender imbalance. maybe the kind of man who ends up writing for an indie webzine is unable to appreciate female artists?

xps

and yeah certain genres are largely gender-coded. hip-hop masculine; r&b feminine; pop feminine, metal masculine. which has a lot to do w/which genres get "critical approval", too.

I don't think being able to appreciate something will automatically make it your favorite thing; a lot of it is going to depend on what music imprinted on you at a watershed moment and, given the demographic skew and the power structure of Western civilization, that means that for many of the people who end up contributing to a "best of" list, many of the entries will feature men, most of whom will be white.

I think this changes across the board when the bars to access drop; the trick is identifying and getting rid of the bars, something that we've made remarkable progress on but likely will not see the full fruits of in our lifetime.

also ;_; that everyone is ignoring my "less"/"fewer" grammar joke

My friend, I don't "politicise" my tastes...

But it's like, the moment you try to address this vast imbalance of how men can't seem to listen to women [...] you're accused of "politicising" things.

I mean, maybe this requires a vast change in the way that female musicians are marketed, a change in the way that men view women...

The mostly male voice of the media is FAR FROM the only problem, and it's massively oversimplifying the matter to say that it is.

― Masonic Boom

I agree with all that, except that I think you're talking about a huge, complicated social issue that can't really be satisfactorily addressed. Maybe in an incremental, long-term sense, but even then, only indirectly, as the net result of a thousand sub-steps. That's why I think it's more useful to focus on simple, practical issues like the fact that music publications refuse to hire women as writers.

And I think you are both politicizing and faulting male taste, as you perceive it, an approach that seems counterproductive to me.

the fact that music publications refuse to hire women as writers

actively refuse?

(and in some cases, as Kerr pointed out about metallers that fight against "girly" music

I should point out that 'girly metal' isnt usually metal thats made by girls, its the metal made to appeal to teenage/pre-teen girls.

and jeff

I think gender imbalance in genre should be taken into account though if 'how many critics are male or female' can also play a part. Not saying 'women don't DJ', I'm saying there is an imbalance that also needs to be addressed.

It doesn't relate to this list but hip-hop is finally starting to show a bit more balance in the jerkin movement than it has done for decades. And not in a 'all female rappers have to be like lil kim and wave around their fanny' kind of way either. Once it stops being kids learning their trade with the odd single to producing albums, I think women in hip-hop - or at least in the jerkin part of the list - may start to show up as more than just 'token female rapper who hangs around with more imposing male rapper'. They are more likely to get written about if they actually doing things and making their own sound.

(Of course, getting more attention/critical respect is not the same as getting enough attention/critical respect.)

xpost.

actively refuse?

― blueski

Well, in effect refuse. TBH, the active/passive question ceases to matter when the end result is so glaringly obvious.

I haven't read the x-posts since the Lex... but

I think, also, when looking back on things, for whatever reason, there is gender distortion.

It's like, when you read contemporary accounts of new music, there's an equal balance. Which seems to disappear with perspective and difference. Like, maybe female artists are viewed as more "pop" and therefore by nature more ephemeral.

I'm thinking of genres like Punk, where Debbie Harry and Patti Smith got as much attention AT THE TIME as the Ramones and Television - or in the UK, Siouxsie and the Slits and X-Ray Spex being players, but looking back retrospectively, it's all the Sex Pistols and the Clash.

I bitch about this in the Nu-Gaze scene - that original era shoegaze was very gender equal - boy-girl acts like MBV and Lush were the people defining the genre. And yet, the retrofetishists all seem to be boys in leather jackets.

But perhaps that's it, that the tendency to assign music into genre and cling to retrofetishist scenes and look back upon the past like a historian is more a male tendency - or at least a rockist tendency, while simply taking things at the moment is the poppist (and therefore perceived as feminine?) one? That it's the men who do the looking back, so they pick what they want to remember.

And then bring into play the different ways that age is treated with regards to gender, when original bands reform...

there's just so many things coming into interplay. It's never simple.

I think that history is viewed through the lens of the cultural default, and in all of the genres you listed it is very easy to revert back to the cultural default (ie, white men).

music publications refuse to hire women as writers.

This just isn't true. When I was writing for CTCL/Plan B, there were quite a few publications that tried to recruit me on those grounds.

In my case, it was that I didn't want to write for those publications. It was't as fun or as interesting as Plan B - or their deadlines and wordcounts or "you can never use the first person" or the insistence on using ratings made me just not WANT to write for them.

There's metal made for preteen girls??

multiple xposts

You never heard Stryper?

(But also, I hated feeling like being tokenised. I used to write letters complaining to guitar magazines, for instance, saying, why do you never cover female guitarists, why do you never have females demonstrating the correct way to finger chords - in fact, no females at all, except the half naked ones posing with BC Riches in the ads? And I did get a letter back - more than once - saying "come and write for us" - but I didn't WANT to be the token girl, you know? so they could turn around to the next person and say "we're not sexist, look, we've got AN GIRL on our staff")

slipknot fans are over 12??

I don't WANT to have to be the token girl repping for the tastes of ALL WOMEN - which is what you are expected to do when you are a Token Girl.

I want men and mens roles to change as much as female roles have changed. But again, pissing in the wind.

Ha Kate, in those situations I have viewed tokenization as an advantage! My thought process has always been "My job is to use every tool possible to get my foot in the door and then kick incredible ass once I'm there. If that includes my race, so be it; it's not like I've got piles of family money/connections behind me."

(Granted, it did get tiring to be asked "how do black people feel about [x]?" all of the time; that's one of the reasons I'm never going back to my hometown. When you're talking employment, though, particularly in an arena you are passionate about, I feel like you're selling your opportunities short if you don't use every tool at your disposal, and sometimes that tool is your race/gender/sexual orientation.)

Maybe, but... these weren't paying gigs, you know? And I had/have too much else going on in my life. I will only EVER do music crit if it's fun. I'd rather be making music or DJing or drawing paisley if I'm not gonna get paid for it.

This just isn't true. When I was writing for CTCL/Plan B, there were quite a few publications that tried to recruit me on those grounds.

― Masonic Boom

Thing is, MB, your experience isn't necessarily indicative of the big picture. It wouldn't be terribly difficult for PFork to hire a few more competent, dedicated female writers, if this was something they really cared to do.

Maybe, but... these weren't paying gigs, you know?

oof say no more

"How would a collection of people come to the consensus that an anti-social record is one of the 20 best albums of the decade? Is it just me or does that seem willfully contradictory?"

Pssh. Either I communicated unclearly or you totally missed my point. Plenty of albums about crime or that are explicitly critical of mainstream culture are none-the-less popular, both critically and with the record buying public.

I'd argue that crime and an album about crime are two distinct things, only one of which is anti-social, and that being critical of mainstream culture does not preclude you from being part of or co-opted by mainstream culture (see emo, Hot Topic).

I don't think it's particularly controversial to opine that the wider an audience for a particular art form becomes, the less shocking that art form becomes, or to argue that by the time you get down to a shortlist of "best [x] whatevers" for a given time period, the contenders you would expect to see on that list should be unsurprising if you understand the audience and the people putting it together.

This makes perfect sense and will, I suspect, almost always be true. This is why those of us who were initially attracted to the risky/transgressive/antisocial aspects of a thing will complain about how "safe" it becomes as it's mainstreamed.

k i like a lot of music sung and/or written by women, but tbh on average i just prefer listening to male singers. ok yes i'm a man but seriously it's a purely aesthetic thing and i think this is true of a lot of people. if i were writing a list and it turned out that every single album was written and sung entirely by men i wouldn't think twice before publishing it, my only consideration would be whether it was an honest reflection of my tastes.

dan OTMing it up

"I'd argue that crime and an album about crime are two distinct things, only one of which is anti-social,"

I'd argue that you're trying to parse my argument too finely, and that if you really want me to qualify everything like a proper essay I can, but that this is going to lead mostly to semantic quibbling and a waste of time. Because as it stands, you're arguing that an album that endorses crime is de facto not anti-social, which would mean that either you've got to argue that it's impossible to create anti-social art or that crime is not anti-social (it was a broad category rather than a specific example, but you appear to have conceded it already, so we can elide debates over whether crime is necessarily anti-social). If you concede that it's possible to create anti-social art, you should also be willing to concede that there has been popular (both mainstream and critically) anti-social art. You were the one who said that anti-social work on a top 20 whatever was contradictory, and I don't think it is. I think it's a cop-out to say so.

It's not particularly controversial to say that things get more mainstream as they get more popular; it's nearly tautological. However, in saying that you should be able to understand the list based on the audience and the people who put it together, you're forgetting both that this list wasn't promoted as "Here are the top vote getters from a bull session me and my pals had down at the bar," but rather a play at objectivity. While we're all sophisticated enough readers to get the biases, you're ignoring that there's still a valid critique in pointing out that by putting forth the list, they're attempting to canonize those biases (which include, say, a stunning lack of diversity, and a lot of humdrum schmindie).

It comes back to the fact that if these are the albums that are being canonized, people have boring, worthy taste in music. That this reflects the selectors and the audience isn't an excuse—why should these people be picking the "best" music if they've got such boring taste? Instead of carrying forth the deemphasizing of the canon, it's indie kids retrenching their mediocre listening at the expense of great music.

Whups—Forgetting both that… etc. and that this list is canonizing biases.

I'd like to see this gender debate get a bit more erm specific. Not because I disagree that there's a "problem" but I think it's hard to say what that is, if it's a single thing etc.

Like, lets think of a couple of prominent categories of female music that mainstream rock crit tends to ignore/marginalize etc. Apologies if making a list seems masculinist and hence part of the problem (although on the other hand I feel uncomfortable with "women don't like making lists" arguments - if only because they remind me of old saws like "men are good with maps; women never lose their socks"... though I guess a simple insertion of "... are conditioned to..." gets over the cultural feminism style essentialism issue)!

1) GROUP: Indie Rock made by or involving females
ISSUE: Not "ignored" maybe, but perhaps critics are less ready to acknowledge "genius"? Very few exceptions eg. Joanna Newsom.

2) GROUP: Female R&B
ISSUE: Ignored to the extent the genre is ignored. In some ways female R&B has a higher profile amongst indie-rock criticism than male R&B, though the difference has narrowed in the past few years. No strict gender bias here, but arguable that the lesser position afforded to R&B vis a vis indie rock is related to a former or even ongoing "music for girls" bias. Does it go without saying that many women have rapped me over the knuckles for liking female R&B on account of its (to compress into a single phrase) negative gender modelling - either content-wise or contextually (e.g. the idea that championing female R&B is effectively endorsing a model of music creation where female artists are "locked out" of much of the creation-side - I don't agree with this argument obv but it's not flat out wrong either, these are vexed and I think interesting issues).

3) GROUP: Female singer-songwriters/folkies/etc.
ISSUE: After Joni Mitchell, almost all are regarded with suspicion by the indie rock press. Some including Kate herself are suspicious of what is perceived to be a limiting notion of femininity in this music (let me know if I'm mischaracterising you here Kate). Though I personally find it difficult to see how, say, Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan can be lumped together in this regard. At any rate the female singer-songwriters/folkies etc. that are accepted by the indie press - Newsom obv., but also, say, Neko Case - don't appear to embrace other concepts of femininity or even be majorly stylistically different, so much as simply possess a requisite if at times ineffable air of "indieness". One thing I'd have to think about more is: are similar male artists lacking a sufficiently indie vibe treated with equal suspicion and/or derision? I'm not sure - anyone have an opinion on this?

4) GROUP: Female country artists.
Ignored to the extent that the genre is ignored/disliked. I could be wrong, but I don't get the sense that indie listeners make gender-biased assumptions about country per se or country artists specifically - male and female artists seem to come in for equal and similar ire, and I don't think country "reads" as feminine to the non-fan.

5) GROUP: Female rappers
ISSUE: Pretty much a mixture of all other categories: ignored to the extent that the genre is ignored, perhaps swimming upstream against a "masculine" sounding chosen genre, perhaps also struggling to be noticed by an indie mindset inclined to find genius in males rather than females...

The fact that all of these are different doesn't disprove the argument that sexism at work (the opposite if anything), but I think it means that it's distortive to simply lump it all together under some broad category of shameful indie male sexism. These things definitely warrant thinking about IMO.

there's also the issue of gendered aesthetics at work here ... if a male artist has a large female fanbase, & does poorly in a pitchfork poll, its a diff issue than a female artist with a larger male fanbase in a pitchfork poll, right?

like, gender of the artist vs. gender of the audience vs. gender of the critic vs. gender of the producer vs. gender of the songwriter vs....

Apologies if making a list seems masculinist and hence part of the problem

I think the discussion is part of the problem anyway tbh, on account of the vast majority of its participants not being women interested in this subject, so you might as well flex those listy muscles like a big man.

i guess i understand where you're coming from when you talk about women not being featured in guitar magazines, because so much of that culture is sexist in a Rock-Typical way. but looking at the above Pitchfork list, i hardly think that gender matters. besides a few obvious exceptions (Jay-Z, the Strokes), and i believe this is the case with pitchfork and indie as a whole, issues of gender and sexuality are repressed/non-existant. not a lot of hetero attitude among the Pitchfork set of bands. ESPECIALLY in this decade, where the indie ideal seems to be Prepubescent Boy Next Door (sufjan stevens) or asexual "genius" collectives (radiohead, wilco). hell, daft punk aren't even HUMAN.

This is such patent bullshit that gender/sexuality issues are non-existent.

It just plays, yet again, into that utterly sexist bullshit that default non-gendered gender = MAN. And does not admit invite the existence of women. It's that old "It doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman" = ALWAYS A MAN.

Kate is totally OTM here.

Yup. It's amazing to me that anyone would say that gender doesn't matter on the PFork list when it's almost all guys. I mean, the math is not complex.

And I wonder about Tim F's genre-splitting. I suspect that the core issue isn't who's being covered and how -- that's just a symptom -- but that the critical voices are almost all male. That the critical culture is a boys club of the most old-fashioned sort.

same reasons as why ILM is male-dominated more or less

That makes sense, except that ILM (like RYM) is a self-selected pool, and therefore its gender skew isn't anyone's responsibility -- to the extent that the local culture doesn't actively exclude interested women, anyway.

Given that PFork and the like selectively hire their writing staff, it's a different issue. Related, sure, but not the same as.